This is not an essential book for jewelry makers, but it covers shard jewelry and is fun to have! If you're short on cash and physical storage space, you can probably pass on picking up Making Bits and Pieces Mosaics by Marlene Hurley Marshall and not miss much in your ongoing jewelry making education. (If you're into mosaics and large-scale furniture projects, however, this book is a must-have.)

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However, if you're looking for an excuse to pick up the next interesting crafts book, this one might give you several hours of fun reading about, and experimenting with, the projects, all of which involve the use of shards of broken china, porcelain, tile, glassware, and even beads and seashells.

The attractive 90-page hardback includes an index, easy to follow line drawings, and step-by-step instruction. It's also lavishly illustrated with full-color photographs. This book will delight anyone who loves china patterns, recycling trash into treasure, and creating funky offbeat large-scale mosaic projects.

If ever you have broken your favorite college mug or the last piece in your grandmother's cherished china set, you can memorialize its pieces in a beautiful crafts project rather than having to toss them out with the trash and feel guilty about it. The ability to rescue broken objects and transform them into something beautiful, different, and new can be very satisfying – especially in that it reduces the waste that ends up in the landfills every year.

The projects center on attaching bits and pieces of broken pottery or china (preferably with an intricate pattern) with some adhesive such as glue or grout or mastic to base-surfaces such as birdhouses, trays, lamps, terra cotta pots, mirror-frames, tabletops, wooden posts, mantelpieces and walls. You can go as small or as big as you like with these three-dimension decorative techniques, many of which look splendid in a garden. The book contains some absolutely breathtaking photographs of entire houses decorated with colorful shards set into elaborate mosaics.

Okay, but what does this have to do with jewelry making, you might ask. Pages 74 through 77 explain the smallest shard project in the book: how to create shard jewelry. In a nutshell, you take a small piece of broken china, preferably with a striking pattern, and use a file to smooth down the edges. You want to shape your shard into a pleasing basic shape such as a circle, oval, or heart. (In the photo at right is a piece of shard jewelry I bought on Etsy.com as part of a charm bracelet; it was made by 34Roses.)

You can either seal the edges with metallic paint or a clear finish such as nail polish, or you can get a little more complex and solder a strip of tin or copper around the edges. Add a bail with glue, or solder your metal edging around it, and you have a pendant! (You can also glue a pin-backing to the shard or a barrette clip, if you'd rather.)

So, in conclusion, this book isn't essential for the jewelry maker, but it's nice to have, especially if you have a larger interest in mosaics. You can find this book on Amazon.com through this link: Making Bits and Pieces Mosaics: Creative Projects for Home & Garden